Ubuntu 18.04 not detected upon cloning to 8 TB SSD

Question

Hello everybody out there using Ubuntu,

Since I was running out of disk space, I cloned my Ubuntu 18.04 installation from a 4TB SSD (Samsung) to a 8TB SSD (also Samsung) using dd. Afterwards, I expanded the Ubuntu partition from 4TB to 8TB on the SSD using GParted.

Although there was a GPT partition table on the 4TB SSD (which was and is booting fine) GParted didn't find a partition table initially and asked me whether it should create one. I confirmed it should create a GPT table, which I confirmed with the sudo parted command (while having booted to the old 4 TB hard-disk and having attached the new 8 TB one as an external disk with an USB adapter):

Model: Samsung Portable SSD T1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 8002GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB                     bios_grub
 2      2097kB  8002GB  8002GB  ext4

In addition, I checked the output of sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.3

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sdc: 15628053168 sectors, 7.3 TiB
Model: Portable SSD T1 
Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 77496514-CFD9-4986-81C9-0ADDBD4EF3F9
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 15628053134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2669 sectors (1.3 MiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048            4095   1024.0 KiB  EF02  
   2            4096     15628052479   7.3 TiB     8300  

However, my Thinkpad X230 does not boot from the 8TB SSD with the error message:

2100: Detection error on HDD0 (Main HDD)

A web search also turned up some results mentioning this could be due to a hardware error, but the 4 TB disk is working fine. The 8 TB disk also works fine, because I can mount it and open the data I had cloned from the 4 TB one. However, I can't boot the 8 TB disk.

Which additional diagnostics could I run to pin down the problem?

Please not that I already ran a fsck -af /dev/sdb2 to rule out potential filesystem errors.

Moreover, I used the boot-repair package for Ubuntu to fix the problem to no success (despite a positive report of the results).

Answer 1

The problem actually turned out not to be caused by the new 8 TB SSD, but rather by an additional mSATA, for which the ThinkPad has an additional slot. Disabling it in /etc/fstab solved the problem.